AI Biologist - Metagenomics

The role

You will contribute to the technical approach for evaluating how AI agents reason through complex microbiome and metagenomics datasets. You will work with software engineers and computational biologists to build ground-truth benchmark datasets from published microbiome studies.

What you will do

• Contribute to the technical approach for evaluating how AI agents reason through complex microbiome and metagenomics datasets
• Build ground-truth benchmark datasets drawn from real published microbiome studies
• Test whether agents can perform critical analytical and interpretive steps executed by expert microbiome researchers
• Define how agent capability in computational microbiology is measured

Required qualifications

• Master's or PhD in microbiology, microbial ecology, bioinformatics, biology, or related field
• 3+ years of hands-on research experience with microbiome or metagenomics data, demonstrated through publications or industry work
• Deep expertise in at least one of: Human microbiome and disease, Longitudinal microbiome or microbiome interventions, Microbial function and metabolism, or Plant, soil, or environmental microbial ecol
• Experience interpreting microbiome data in biological context and identifying confounders, technical artifacts, and limitations of the underlying experiments
• Proficiency in Python and/or R for biological data analysis and visualization
• Familiarity with 16S and/or shotgun metagenomics, including taxonomic, functional, and community-level analysis

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience designing or troubleshooting microbiome experiments, including sampling, extraction, controls, or library preparation
• Experience integrating metagenomics with metabolomics, metatranscriptomics, host omics, or clinical phenotypes
• Experience with strain-level analysis, metagenomic assembly, MAGs, or long-read sequencing

Benefits

• Health, dental, vision: 100% covered for you, 50% for dependents
• 401(k) (no match)
• PTO: 12 days to start, more as you’re promoted
• Catered lunch and dinner (onsite)
• Unlimited snacks (onsite)
• Company outings most months
• Team off-sites

Before you apply

• If your profile matches, you will receive a take-home project
• Background check once you accept

About the company

Latch builds rigorous scientific benchmarks for AI agents across biology. They work with frontier labs and pharma to measure whether agents can handle real biological workflows.